Let’s begin with her feet. Ten proper toes
pressed into pink ink then pressed again on one

side of a small card—two tender rhodies
determined to root in the heavy dark of a Port Orford winter.

The first question I ask the nurse is not is it a boy

We rode together, you and I down that blanketed coastal road.
Port Orford to Bandon and back again. Me, at the front
of the bus to not get queasy. You, inside the ocean
of my belly. In the beginning, we knew nothing of charred ground.
What came before. What would come after. But after

She is the absence of light
at the edge of the door
bruise of sky on the horizon